The message/advertisement industry is nearly $75 billion. Advertising agencies estimate nearly half of this amount to be wasted since many users do not prefer to view message/advertisements due to a variety of reasons. There are many drawbacks and shortcomings to known advertising delivery. One drawback is that advertisements often interrupt regular programming. It is well known that viewers often skip commercials by leaving the room during the interruption of their televised program and return at the end of the commercial, thereby missing the commercial completely.
More recently with the use of digital video recorders (DVR), such as TiVO, many viewers simply fast forward through the commercials to avoid being interrupted during regular broadcast and cable programming. This causes many commercials to be missed.
Further, currently there is no mechanism to time-shift the advertisements and other messages after the regular programming. Stated differently, viewers are not given a choice of when to view a particular commercial relative to the regular programming.
Another drawback from an individual user's perspective is that a specific message/advertisement may be irrelevant or not interesting. Advertisement and messages can be targeted by a geographic viewing region, but currently there is no mechanism to target a specific individual viewer within a geographic viewing region.
Another drawback is typical television based advertisement does not take advantage of alternate delivery methods such as printing, displaying a second audio/video presentation, e-mail, fax, wired and wireless handsets and more.
According what is needed is a method and system to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks encountered in the prior art and to provide an unobtrusive, low cost, user-initiated method that provides multiple delivery channels for advertisements and messages.